Resident Evil and Street Fighter developer Capcom has clarified its stance on AI and its future plans for the RE Engine in an exclusive conversation with IGN.
Capcom held its yearly recruitment conference on October 2, wherein programmer Satoshi Ishida outlined the company’s plans to incrementally improve its RE Engine using a program called REX (short for RE Next Engine).
Rather than building a new engine from scrap, Ishida explained that a series of steps will be taken to improve the RE Engine piece by piece. This includes the use of AI, which gave fans pause after the news broke online.
We bent the ear of a spokesperson at Capcom, who laid out the challenges its developers are currently facing that led the company to rethink how it makes games with the RE Engine. They confirmed that games are becoming increasingly colossal undertakings, to the point where titles now take up immense amounts of time and resources to create. With AI being a swiftly-advancing technology, Capcom saw the opportunity to use it to solve these issues and make its developers more efficient by improving their development tools, testing game code for them, and analyzing large chunks of data on their behalf, as well as other helpful benefits.
Capcom’s vision for REX is to implement these AI tools and efficiencies into the next iteration of the RE Engine to help the company make games faster with the strongest tools available to it. The spokesperson told us that Capcom has no plans to use generative AI in the creation of its games (which creates content based on a prompt, as opposed to other types of AI that are used to analyze patterns, make predictions, process data, etc.). Any AI used with the RE Engine will be for the express purpose of speeding up processes and helping development teams be more efficient.
This means that AI will not be used for creating assets or programs in games. Capcom said as much back in March during a shareholders’ meeting, where the company was asked how it intends to use artificial intelligence in its products.
“We will not implement assets generated by AI into our games.” Capcom said. “However, we plan to proactively use it as a contributing technology to improve the efficiency and productivity of the game development process. To this end, we are currently exploring ways to implement it in various areas, including graphics, sound and programming.”
Upcoming Capcom games include Resident Evil Veronica and Mega Man: Dual Override.
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